“Your story is full of holes. It’s all going to come out eventually, and I don’t want you feeling worse for what you have done later. I’m offering you the chance to tell me what you know so that you won’t feel ashamed. Telling me will lighten your heart.”
Max gets up unceremoniously, goes upstairs. Slams his door. The Reverend Duffy is now alone with the plus-size women and he sits through several commercial breaks, always coming back to the talk show, and then he falls into a stuporous slumber that comes on like fever. There is a sick member of the congregation, Mrs. Milliken, but he forgets about her. There is the bereaved family, the Ericksons, whose son just died of lymphoma. The stupor wipes away the Ericksons. The great forgetting of afternoon television is upon him, and he is asleep, and the commercials are singing their jingles into his slumbering ears, and they are telling him about excellent medications that he should ask his doctor about, Lipitor and Nexium and Elysium, they are telling him about feminine products, and they are telling him various things that will help him with the family wash, and they are telling him about other programs that he might enjoy, and all of these things are much louder than the responsibility of the last Sunday of the church calendar and the manifold signs of the end of the age, and he hears of Lipitor and Nexium and also of the stars falling from the sky and the heavenly bodies trembling. Never have the End Times been more apparent than in the combination of ranting of plus-size women and the traumatic napping of an insomniac Reverend Duffy, and when he wakes a half hour later, with the television unaccountably turned off, he feels acutely the disgust of a violent waking. He’s nauseated and disgusted and hates the world, and hates himself for having watched the plus-size women when he should have been calling on the Ericksons, but instead of calling on the Ericksons, he goes directly upstairs to the office and to the typewriter, which still trembles and hums in the way that typewriters do:
1 As he was leaving the temple, one of his disciples said to him, “Look, Teacher! What massive stones! What magnificent buildings!”
2 “Do you see all these great buildings?” replied Jesus. “Not one stone here will be left on another; every one will be thrown down.”
So it follows that edifices will fall, just as we all are fallen men and women, just as I am myself, who has given to this parish things he does not have, namely charity and love. Your faith gives me faith today, when my own family most needs it.
Dusk already! The days are getting so intolerably short, and the end of the year is coming, with all the dread of winter. His wife comes back into the house, and he doesn’t even call out to her. She has gone and she has returned, and he has taken no notice of it. The tension would seem to call for something, but what is the something that it calls for? He has not had a stiff drink in many a year, but maybe tonight is the night for a stiff drink. He doesn’t know how to sit still, nor what to do with himself. He hasn’t done a legitimately ministerial thing all day, nor has he spoken to anyone but the police and his wife and son.
When he goes into the kitchen, his wife has some pasta boiling, which he might as well have made himself, as he is an expert boiler of pasta. They are here when the knock at the door comes. The two of them go to the door, he with the dishrag in his hands because he just tasted the pasta and pronounced it not quite ready, and when they open the door it is the door opened on the lesson of prodigality, on the lesson of the son who wastes his advantages and resources only to return home to be loved, to be loved because the prodigal son is now in the light on the front step, here he is, and the prodigal son is loved! He looks as if he has never been looked at, he looks as if he has set a new world record for dishevelment, and he has on no shoes at all, and his shirt is untucked, and his hands are waving madly, as if his hands have now liberated themselves, and he is crying this low, savage cry, the cry of relapsed madness; or the son seems to come in from the wilderness, even though there is no wilderness in Newton; there is no topographical wilderness here, the reverend knows, and yet tears are streaming down the face of the adopted son, and his parents are on the step, and they have their son in their arms, because the son has come home, and he is in their arms, and the three of them are there, in the light of the step, and the neighbors must be watching, but what does it matter if the neighbors are watching, damn the neighbors, what is God to the reverend and his son but an inadvertent thing, unless of course there is the action of grace in the moment of the return of the son, the son on the front step, wearing no shoes, cuts upon his feet and hands, who may or may not have done whatever it is he is accused of having done but who is now here, is now home, and his parents are with him, for he has no other place to go, and his father is the agent of forgiveness, and the agent of forgiveness is bringing the son into the house, all the things that divide us should not divide us, because those things are nothing, those things are just hesitations, and the wife of the reverend, the mother of the son, is saying, “Mercy, mercy,” and she is picking up the phone, but the phone will not help, because the son’s wickedness is now commuted, whatever it is, whatever it was, because the reverend is holding his son, his gigantic son; his son is in danger, and his father has not yet done everything he could do, nor has he believed as strongly as he could believe, but now he will, and now the father loves the son again, because the scriptures are correct:
It is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.
You would think that the ward throve at night, that the inpatients of detoxification were at their best overnight, in half shadows, stirring up from their apnea. You would think that the wraiths would be up and wandering, mumbling as they passed. But you’d be wrong. Rosa alone is up, gazing out the window at the neon of the chain bookstore on the next block over. Maybe if she listens carefully enough to the sounds of the nightscape, cars toiling up Seventh Avenue, sirens, jets overhead, then she’ll hear what’s genuinely taking place, rather than what is not. It doesn’t matter, though, how loud she gets them to turn up the television in the dayroom.
There are events that are almost certainly taking place, and then there are dubious events. Those conversations she heard today, those girls, the ones who work in publicity or whatever it is that they do. They were gabbing with the development expert at her daughter’s company, gabbing about some intern she’d hired. “You wouldn’t even believe how lazy this girl is; she sets a new record for laziness. She’s so lazy that she can’t be bothered to
refuse
to do anything, because it would take too much energy to refuse. She’s so lazy that it’s amazing she even comes in; she just sits there like a bump on a log, and it’s not like she’s doing her nails or anything because she doesn’t have any nails. She chews at her nails, all the black nail polish is chipping off, and she bites them anyway.” “Doesn’t that make you sick? Plus, aren’t you supposed to avoid eating your nail polish?” “Totally. You shouldn’t eat it. I guess someone should design edible nail polish; maybe we should tell Mercurio.” “Reminds me of those . . . those
edible panties
that that girl, who was that, used to talk about, remember?” “Wait, why does it remind you of . . . never mind, ick.” Then, after Rosa overhears this conversation in her detoxifying head, she can’t stop saying the words
edible panties,
as if these words are somehow the key, as if they are deeply relevant to the present,
edible panties,
and over dinner she can’t stop herself from saying it. When she’s at the dining table with the girl, the one with bleeding problems, she keeps saying “edible panties,” and the girl keeps asking why. But Rosa, who finds the whole notion of these underdrawers shocking and improper, can’t figure out why she keeps saying it, she just does.
That’s a conversation composed of people she likes. If she has to be overhearing cellular phone traffic in her head, at least she’d prefer to overhear the conversations of people she favors. She could offer advice to the voices. “Is it true that you’re having a problem with . . .” Whatever it might be. Unfortunately, her difficulty is not just with conversations of people she knows. Now if she stands too close to the window, she hears these telephone whispers from the entire expanse beneath her. They are out there in the universe, conversations drifting over her like a layer of digital smog. “Honey, no one is hotter than you; you are just the hottest thing I’ve ever seen in my life. Are you alone?” “Sure.” “And what are you wearing, baby?” “You’re not going to start in with this again, because last time you didn’t talk to me for like three weeks afterwards, and it made me feel dirty.” She doesn’t know for certain what these people are talking about, but she has an idea. No one should have to overhear these conversations, which are a layer of pollution.
She heads for the pay phone, the one in the corridor that they all share. At the nurse’s console, there’s a night nurse, asleep in her chair, chin planted in the middle of her chest, mouth open. A fusillade of snores issues from that mouth. Rosa pays the nurse no mind and slips past her to the wall phone. She presses the zero in the keypad and waits. A sequence of beeps. An actor’s voice comes on, the voice of Darth Vader. Before she can evaluate the particulars of the Vader voice, there’s a hiss and another voice comes on. This voice asks her what she needs. “Well, you see, I’m in a . . . I’m in the . . . I’m indisposed . . . and I’m finding myself in this unusual situation. . . .” She waits for supportive words from the operator; none are forthcoming. “The situation is . . . well, uh, the situation is that there are certain telephone calls that are . . . that are —” Rosa tries to whisper the complaint, so that the night nurse won’t be disturbed. The operator replies, “Do you need a number? Because that’s what we’re supposed to —” “Not at all,” Rosa says, shuffling in her paper slippers, back and forth. “I don’t need any numbers, I have all the . . . ” “You’re complaining about people who talk too loudly on their cell phones? I’m sorry, but you can’t blame the telephone company for people who talk too loudly into their phones; you should take that up with the —” “That’s not . . . ,” Rosa says, “I’m saying that I . . . I’m saying . . . that I can
hear
the conversations —” “But where can you hear the conversations?” “
Everywhere,
everywhere I go, I can hear them in my head. . . . I can hear the people and they’re having the . . . and I can hear what they’re saying, even if . . . people I don’t know very well. I keep expecting . . . I’m going to hear my ex-husband . . . with his floozies, I haven’t . . . he hasn’t . . . probably twenty years, but my daughter . . . she might want to . . . since he’s her father, and if I could hear that conversation, maybe, but instead . . . or I hear some businessman who’s making some deal in a . . . acquaintances . . . or I —” “Excuse me, ma’am, we can’t —” “She ought to be able to talk to that . . . her father. . . . I don’t give a goddamn whether I ever speak to him, but that’s just not right, and I want you to talk to whoever it is there that . . .” “Ma’am?” “Your manager . . . I am a person who has connections. . . . I was . . . I used to know people who could get things done, and maybe now I’m . . . maybe my circumstances . . . no reason why your company needs to pick on an old woman,” and she tries to remind herself to pipe down, to keep it to a whisper, but she can’t help herself, because it’s an outrage, you know, these corporations, just not answerable. “You can’t go filling my brain up with these calls . . . no reason why a woman like me should have to hear . . . and I guarantee you . . . you don’t want to have that kind of trouble on your hands —”
A dial tone by the time the night nurse comes over and takes the handset from her, replaces it in its cradle.
“You can’t be up doing this sort of thing.”
“I was . . .”
“I don’t care if your ass falls off, you can’t be out here on the phone at this hour. Now, get to your room.” The night nurse puts an arm around Rosa and walks her down the corridor. For a second, it’s as if there’s no time but this time of the corridor. As if she needs just one thing to bring about the cessation of voices and that thing is another person’s arm around her. If human kindness were reliable, then Rosa might leave behind these fortressed walls and return to Eleventh Street, where she left off, to store up a new supply of backdated magazines and newspapers while forgetting to eat. But the fact is that human kindness must come to an end, and it comes to an end right before the door to the room that she shares with the slumbering obese woman. Inside, a darkness more perfect and terrifying than any she has known. The nurse says nothing, points into the space, and then Rosa follows the end of her arm, the crooked pointing finger, and continues, tentatively, into the room as the night nurse firmly closes the door behind her. Immediately, Rosa can hear the voice of some politician, the mayor of the city, and the mayor is calling somebody, city councilman, or maybe it’s the chief of police. Must be. The mayor is talking to this personage about his new program to prevent the spread of some menace that she can’t, at first, identify. “Look, we’ve got to have something in place that deals with it; we have to indicate that we have
zero tolerance
for it because you know any time of day someone could be just walking down the street,” and then gradually the nature of the call emerges, “and could allow
waste
to spread on the block, someone else comes along, you know, they could . . . there could just be a spreading of waste; we just can’t have that.” “But,” remarks the other, “are you sure that you want to allocate resources on this? After all, even with the . . . and do we really think this is a pressing issue when we —” “Listen, your job is to implement, and what I think would do the trick is a small mobile force deployed at all the frequent locations, like around the parks, and we could issue summonses for people who don’t discharge their obligations, and the reason we need to do this is that if someone sees one . . . one mound of waste, then he is going to feel that it’s really not a critical situation and actually it’s rather cold here in the middle of November and maybe it would be all right for Rover here to . . .”